The Evolving Role of the Enterprise Data Warehouse in the Era of Big Data Analytics (Ralph Kimball)

In this white paper, we describe the rapidly evolving landscape for designing an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) to support business analytics in the era of "big data." We describe the scope and challenges of building and evolving a very stable and successful EDW architecture to meet new business requirements. These include extreme integration, semi- and un-structured data sources, petabytes of behavioral and image data accessed through MapReduce/Hadoop as well as massively parallel relational databases, and then structuring the EDW to support advanced analytics. This paper provides detailed guidance for designing and administering the necessary processes for deployment. This white paper has been written in response to a lack of specific guidance in the industry as to how the EDW needs to respond to the big data analytics challenge, and what necessary design elements are needed to support these new requirements.